The particular sandwich in question is photographed for you below.

There are some key points about this sandwich that are important to know.

The bread is made in a traditional Madeiran way that involves using sweet potato. Yep, that’s two types of carbs in the same foodstuff. An excellent way to start a sandwich.

You’ll also notice that the bottom 5mm or so of the top slice of bread seems to be green. This is because it has been used to soak up a large amount garlic butter. The bottom slice has also met the same fate. So, to be clear, we’re starting this sandwich with bread that is made with potato and then soaked in garlic butter.

Then you can see the steak. Looks pretty good. I ordered it medium, which I think this pretty much is, and means that you have quite a lot of bloody steak juice also mingling in with the garlic butter. Impressive. It’s also incredibly tender, meaning it’s easy to bite through with just teeth. Important in a steak sandwich.

Those things that look a bit like they might be chips are in fact some of the largest tomatoes you’ll ever see. I mean in the overall scheme of things, tomatoes are fairly insignificant, but if they’re going to hang around, then they might as well be really fucking huge.

Then there’s some lettuce. I’m not going to lie to you; this is entirely inconsequential.

Finally, we finish with the second slice of bread. As already mentioned, this is soaked in garlic butter too, because, you know, one slice of bread soaked in garlicy goodness just wasn’t enough. Epic.

What a sandwich.

Also, if anyone was in any doubt that Madeirans really know how to do bread, the below photo is a picture of a side-roll (one of those rolls you get at the beginning of a meal whilst you wait for your starter) from a restaurant. Those lumps you can see on top of it are bacon. Bacon.

Foursquaropoly from Deanna McDonald on Vimeo.

And I dare you to watch this one on the future of video game controls without a large smile on your face. This would just be cool (although demand for parking lots would surely go through the roof)

And the thing is, it’s every year, like Christmas. In fact, for the bosses of the rail firms, it’s probably better than Christmas (what do you get for the Southern Railways CEO who has everything?)

The real problem of course is that the very idea of privatised rail is fundamentally flawed. Privatisation is a bastion of capitalism, built around the idea that private competition will trim bloated ex-public sector bodies and result in a better service.

The problem is that in order for capitalism to work effectively you need competition. It’s sort of fundamental to the concept. Competition provides choice, which allows me as the consumer to vote with my feet. Charge too much, or provide too shoddy a product, and the consumer will go to your competitor. If enough consumers move, you’re forced to lower your price, or improve your product, to win customers back. Thus the market self-regulates; it is the concept of competition and the choice that competition provides that forces individual companies to behave in a way that is pro-consumer.

Now back to the railways. If you want to, or have to, travel by rail you effectively have NO choice as to the supplier of your service. Each rail company has an effective monopoly on the routes that they serve. If I want to get a train from London Victoria to Orpington (for example) I HAVE to use Southeastern. There is no realistic choice, which is as good as no choice at all.

At this point then, the company can behave as they wish. There is no competition to regulate the market, so poor service and high prices are the inevitable results for any business primarily driven by the need to make profits. Without competition, there is no pressure on the business to lower prices (thereby earning less money and lowering profits) or improve service (thereby spending more money and lowering profits).

I realise that rail contracts are regularly put out to tender (every 5 years?), and thus this should provide an element of competition, with individual companies bidding to provide the best service. However, the problem with this is that it still doesn’t provide consumer choice. There maybe competition to win the tender, but the consumer has no direct say in what the ‘best’ bid is, not any ability to influence the decision, or future decisions, post-awarding of the contract.

You need more than just competition to regulate capitalist industry.You need the consumer to have the ability to choose from a variety of competitors. Unless consumers as a group have the ability to threaten the bottom-line profits of business, then the business is not obligated to consider them or respond to their criticism.

In effect therefore, the privatisation of railways was nothing more than a license to print money. And unless by some miracle we re-nationalise them, then terrible customer service and ongoing fare hikes are likely to be the reality for many years to come.

http://somethingniceforashraf.tumblr.com/

Anonymous foretell of the end of Facebook, which personally I wouldn’t mind too much, if only because it would demonstrate how much power these people wield:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/anonymous-vows-destruction-of-facebook-on-guy-fawkes-day/601

(side note: anyone else notice the similarities of language between the riot reporting and that Anonymous piece? Anonymous are also mainly teenage youths right? The geek equivalent of leveling your own neighbourhood perhaps)

“The problem lies with the people, not with the tools” - good slideshow defending the use of social media during the riots. Just to clarify - it’s not Twitter’s fault:

http://www.slideshare.net/mobileyouth/the-london-riots-wtf-graham-brown-mobileyouth

Riots and hacking don’t really matter anyway, because one day soon the US really will default on its debts and then the whole world will be fucked. Good explanation of why this might be true:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjv-MtGpj2U&feature=youtu.be

And finally, lovely piece of teacher vs former student banter on Facebook. DOUBLE BURN!

http://twitpic.com/5xdzoc

I’ve got a couple more up on my Flickr page.

I really dislike statements like this. Not because I want to encourage people to be boring, but because it suggests that perhaps there was a time in the past where we could afford to be boring. Like the idea of being interesting is somehow new.

It also implies that at some stage before this decline, we the audience were just slaves to the ITV ad break, waiting like dribbling zombies to senselessly consume whatever was served up to us.

Yet perhaps kettle spikes at half-time of the FA Cup final suggests otherwise. Perhaps we’ve always been able to find something to do other than sit through the ads.

When I was a kid, I used to race my brother to the toilet during ad breaks in Star Wars. Later at university, I used to smoke a quick cigarette during the ad break in Babylon 5. There has NEVER been such a thing as Automatic Audience Interest, and interesting has ALWAYS been the only currency of any value.

There are certain ads that I always remember, that work so well I still talk about them today - the Audi ad with the dislikeable yuppi, the Levi’s ads that sent one-hit-wonders to the top of the charts, the Heineken Water in Majorca ad. Good ads worked. And good ads still work - think the Cadbury’s Gorilla or the Old Spice ad (which people forget worked pretty well as a TV ad before working pretty well as a social media campaign).

The point is that lines like this are often used as a criticism of advertising, to suggest the old world is dead, and build up a hype-fear to drive whatever the latest buzzword consultants and experts are trying to push. It doesn’t actually help move the industry forwards. Sometimes I think we need to acknowledge that advertising has always been interesting; has always needed to be interesting.

The question really is why? Why is some advertising, or any other form of communication, interesting? And I think the answer lies in an understanding of culture. Understanding culture lets you understand how to make something that resonates with that culture. Something that people want to talk about, pass on, be part of. And good advertising has always managed to do this.

So if we understand the culture we’re creating for, we can begin to produce something that’s interesting. Something that people will talk about, will call up radio shows to debate, will chat to colleagues about whilst they’re waiting for the kettle to boil in the morning.

But like I say, that’s not a new idea. That’s always been the case. In the rush to embrace all things new and shiny, we should be careful not to forget some of the things that came before them.

Well-paying, they request to be taught that filing lawsuits is not the line of performance to strand foetid piracy. Exceedingly than, it’s to row-boat something in the most castigate beaten path than piracy. Like concord of use. It’s indubitably a cyclopean numbers easier to utter iTunes than to search the Internet with imperil of malware and then crappy bestow make an exhibit, but if people are expected to redress turn behind from loads and splatter all together seeing that ages, it’s not fruitful to work. They lone be subjected to a lop value once you can remodel about people work out software and Noose sites that short it ridiculously tranquilly to infringer, and up the quality. If that happens, then there compel be no stopping piracy. But they’re too energetic and appalled of losing. Risks consign nativity to to be bewitched!

Almost reads like a Burroughs novel.

1. Poolga.com has some wonderful desktop wallpapers.
2. Game mechanics don’t work if they’re placed on top of something that isn’t fun. Therefore, if you use them, make sure what you’re building is FUN.
3. Pachube.com is a wonderful resource to help connect internet-enabled objects together. The Internet of Things is among us.
4. The end goal in-and-of itself is not enough to get people to reach the end goal. You need small, immediate feedback that allows instant reward and incremental participation, which should result in incremental gains.
5. You should build tools to allow people to convince themselves to join in.
6. The overall solution to a problem might be bigger than any one individual can understand.
7. A marketplace welcomes you even if you have no money to spend. You can go there just to hang out. This is how it differs from a market.
8. Wilsonbrothers.co.uk are 3 brothers that create seriously cool retail experiences
9. If people are shopping online, do you really need to stock all the products in-store? Is there scope to use retail space as a larger brand experience?
10. Invite other brands into your retail space to create a greater, combined and complimentary experience
11. riittaikonen.com. It is always cool if you make a leaf costume and wear it sat in a tree.
12. Always look to get nearly arrested.
13. The disgusting creates a macabre attraction. Disgust is a form of fascination, and therefore can build a surprising relationship with individuals.
14. Big business can turn human beings into automatons, suffering from a lack of craft.
15. Listening to The Who once a month will make your life better.
16. The bassist from The Who could really play.
17. Create things that have a point of view. These are the things that start conversations; that start stories.
18. Networked culture renders everything immediate, and creates a philosophy called Atemporality.
19. Make stuff people want.
20. You need to unpack the story and lie in it for a while before you tell it. Really understand what you want to say before you say it.
21. Stats from McKinsey will help in presentations.
22. Futurology is rubbish. Even if you could tell what was about to happen, what would you have actually added? You just get to say you’re right.
23. Look for what is neglected NOT what is next.
24. Look for the ugly and make that shiny. Looking for the shiny is just copying.
25. Urgent Evoke is an online alternate reality game developed by The World Bank Institute.
26. We shoud all follow @lendmesomesugar on Twitter.
27. Mobile phones are having a great impact on medical diagnosis, from registering a new birth via SMS to diagnosing the type of cough you have.
28. T-shirts that have emergency medical instruction on them are quite cool.
29. Have a makers perspective on everything. MAKE things. DO things.

With apologies that I haven’t correctly attributed who said what, a massive thank you to Jason Fields, Dan Hon, Usman Haque, Dougald Hine, Ben & Oscar Wilson, Piers Fawkes, Riitta Ikonen, Katrin Baumgarten, Thomas Thwaites, Matt Jones, John Grant and Kyle Studstill for taking the time to write presentations and turn up and talk to us all. A full list of speakers with a bit more background on each of them is available on the Eventbrite page for the event.

So, anyway, as a sort of final Reading Room goodbye, I would also like to suggest that you all check out the last project I worked on there, the rather wonderful 1940 Chronicle for Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund. It’s a live-blogging project telling a fictional story throughout each day of the Battle of Britain and it was very kindly described by Leon Jaume from  WCRS in Campaign magazine as “… one of the most powerful and least expected users of social media I’ve yet seen. It’s also brave, ambitious and moving, and I love them for doing it” … which was very nice of him, so thank you Leon. It’s also one of the projects I’m most proud of being involved with over my 4 years at Reading Room - the ultimate literal expression of telling stories online, and using them to start conversations, and it’s great to see it be appreciated.

Other than that I’ve been playing around with some ideas of why digital seems to sometimes cause such problems for business and communication, and perhaps - inspired by The Medium is the Massage - how somethings haven’t really changed at all. More soon …

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